


at the end

by brokentombstone



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Dark Daenerys Targaryen, F/M, executions, losing the war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:54:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25623940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokentombstone/pseuds/brokentombstone
Summary: She enjoyed the few seconds of merciful bliss before they became mere wisps, fading into oblivion as easily as she had conjured them.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 13
Kudos: 84





	at the end

**Author's Note:**

> uh more notes at the end but this is not happy, like at all. the warning is right there.

All was lost.

Sansa waited in her cell and these were the only three words that bounced around in her head. All around them their dreams had crumbled, their plans went up in flames, and everything worth fighting for was so long gone that she couldn’t remember if it had ever been real. 

Inside her cell, Sansa closed her eyes.

But in her reverie she could see it so clearly. She was back in Winterfell, standing in the courtyard as snow fell so lightly around her. She looked down and saw a warm woollen cloak, embroidered with a design of direwolves. She turned and looked upwards. Her mother and father were standing over them on Winterfell’s ramparts. They were older than they ever had the chance to be. The grey hairs that framed their faces and the laugh lines that had been etched into their faces with care showed Sansa that here, peace was inevitable. It was a beautiful picture, a tapestry traversing the tragedy of time. 

She turned as she heard a whistling noise. She watched, transfixed, as Robb loosed an arrow into the target. All her ghosts come back, not to haunt her, but to bring her comfort in this final hour. Robb turned to her for the briefest second and his teeth glinted in the midday sun. From across the courtyard Sansa watched a faceless woman she never had the chance to meet applaud for Robb, his wife she assumed, her stomach round with child. Simple unburdened adoration beamed from Robb’s face for a future he never got to have. 

She turned around then towards the doors and saw Bran and Rickon came in on horseback, almost men grown by then. They were ribbing each other about something, words Sansa would never hear. Bran was impossibly unharmed by his fall (Sansa realized in this dream it had never happened, the Starks untouched by the crimes that befell them in Sansa’s world), and of course Rickon was alive, not dead with Ramsay’s arrow in his heart. They both looked so whole, so vibrant with the miracle of their life, they didn’t even notice Sansa. As if her presence was as unremarkable as the rest of this. 

Just then a sudden noise. And Arya startled them all from behind, she appeared as if from nowhere. The boys nearly fell off their horses and Arya could only laugh at them. Her hair was tied back in a plait and somehow Sansa knew it was  _ her  _ who had braided her sister’s hair. Her eyes pricked with tears. She turned away from her sister. Robb shook his head at the shenanigans and Sansa looked up at her parents, smiles were there, so easy for them, so weightless. It was peaceful and happy in a way that Sansa had never known. 

Before Sansa pulled herself from the dream though there was a final piece. She felt the hand on her back and knew. Her body tensed but then relaxed, she couldn’t help herself. She turned and it was Jon, holding a little girl. Their girl. Sansa knew these facts inexplicably without question. She smiled up at him and he pecked her cheek. Easy, it was all too easy. Sansa brushed some hair out of their daughter’s face, a mixture of her and Jon. Deep red hair and Jon’s grey eyes. Jon’s hand steadied her back and she had just enough time to realize that nobody in the courtyard was perturbed by their behaviour. That here the world knew they were cousins, they didn’t risk any scorn or rejection. No looming threat of dragons. 

She enjoyed the few seconds of merciful bliss before the people around her all became mere wisps, fading into oblivion as easily as she had conjured them. Her family had become figments of a world outside of her grasp.

Back in her cell Sansa knew the truth. Everyone of them had died, cruelly, needlessly. At the hands of tyrants and villains or defending their family from further harm. And now, Sansa knew, without a doubt she was the last Stark, that her family’s legacy would die with her. Her final fear came to fruition after years of miraculous survival. 

First there was her father, beheaded by the Lannisters. A gruesome sight Sansa would take with her all the way to her own rapidly approaching death sentence. Before that wound had settled, instead festering for so long it became numb, there had been her mother and Robb. Butchered under the false protection of guest rites by the schemes of the Lannisters and the Boltons, they hadn’t even spared Robb’s pregnant wife, the Stark heir she carried too much of a risk. And then the baby of the Starks. Rickon’s end had been years later, after such a short time of even understanding and believing that he had lived, he was ripped from them by the Bolton’s, one final twist of the knife before her and Jon obliterated that stain from the North. 

But it was what happened after. What happened after held no flame to any of that. The sorrows of the Starks hadn’t ended there, though Sansa thinks they should have. And Sansa knew that it was because she had actually had hope, for a few glimmering months she had stupidly believed that they would make it out the other side of this. 

Maybe she had never stopped being that foolishly naive girl watching her father’s head roll at her feet and realizing that storybook heroes are only that, things of myth and legend. You’d think she would've learned after all that happened since then, but a part of Sansa wanted her life to be a song, wanted  _ their  _ life to be a song. 

When Bran had died during the Battle of Winterfell, Sansa had never caught her breath again. It shouldn’t have been such a surprise. And yet she lived in a perpetual state of loss. Warging into Viserion had been too much for the frailty of her last brother. Rhaegal and Viserion had taken each other out but Bran never woke up after that, his body remained motionless and rigid. His sacrifice hadn’t been enough in the end, a dragon still lived and Sansa would never stop resenting that despite Bran’s bravery it hadn’t been enough. Theon hadn’t been spared either, he had still fallen protecting him from the Night King, not knowing that the real threat was miles above them flying in the skies. It was some small comfort, knowing that Bran’s final moments had been spent in the sky, finally free. 

(Jon had carried the body back to the castle. But there was nothing left of the boy who had once been a brother to them all. Sansa had wept over the corpse as Jon held her and Arya had looked too grim to even speak, she was but a girl again. No faceless man in the wake of such loss). 

It had gone from bad to worse quickly after that. They’d all travelled South, refusing to be parted from each other and leaving Winterfell in the hands of the Northmen. Maybe that was their first mistake, Sansa thought now, their family had never fared well in the South and they had taken themselves there anyways. It was well known that a Stark must always remain in Winterfell, and they had broken the most sacred rule of them all. 

It came fast. The slaughter of the city. Sansa and Jon had warred against it and gone back to their tent defeated night after night. Heads hanging down and shoulders heavy with a burden they no longer wanted. It was unthinkable to Sansa, that they hadn’t been able to prevent it. She could still see it all burning, still smell the singed flesh. 

Sansa had watched with the others as the city fell and all she could think was that Cersei would have been better. That she should have went to her moons ago, if she knew that it would be like this she would have. She could’ve endured it to avoid the madness of the Dragon Queen. (But Cersei was dead now, Sansa could feel it as the city crumbled in the distance. It was like Cersei  _ was  _ the city and Sansa knew one wouldn’t last long without the other). 

When the fighting stopped and she had gone into the streets, she searched desperately for Jon and Arya with the others and when she had seen the destruction first hand it had taken everything in her not to merely collapse there. Part of her wished she had because she wouldn’t have had to endure finding Arya, her little sister battered and bruised. 

She had bled out, unceremoniously, on the same street she had once hid in when their father died. It was a cold irony, that they ended up back here again. She had rasped out a few final words as Sansa held her, tears flowed freely. Sansa forgot most of them, too enclosed in her own grief but she knew the last one well.  _ Winterfell.  _

It was a command. Get out of her, get to Winterfell. Barricade yourself and preserve our family, hunker down for Winter and the wolves will out. Even in the end Arya was trying to protect her, trying to be strong. And Sansa wanted to listen to her, she really did. She had always been stronger in Winterfell’s walls. But there was Jon. 

Always Jon. 

She had found him for only the briefest of moments before they were taken into custody. She hadn’t cared, hadn’t even thought about it when she kissed him in the streets mere feet from where Arya’s still warm body laid. She had clutched at him even as war-weary as he was. And he hadn’t hesitated. He pulled her flush against him and held her so tightly she thought she might just snap under the weight but for the first time in what she could remember she felt safe. He tasted of dirt and dragonfire but also like home. She knew her own mouth was filled with salty tears and the ash of burning bodies. What a pity she thought, the pair they made.

It hadn’t been a secret. (It had been the only secret). But after Jon returned from Dragonstone disgusted by the Dragon Queen and had explained to Sansa all that had transpired, once Bran explained the truth of his birth. Well it had been inevitable. They had collided. And now here on the destroyed streets of King’s Landing Sansa wondered if it would have been different if they hadn’t given in to the temptation. Was their love the cause of this utter destruction? 

Over Jon’s shoulder Sansa saw a glint of white. The Dragon Queen approached. Daenerys would’ve been a fool not to suspect it by then. They hadn’t ever been as discrete as they should’ve been, but Daenerys had always been a master of her own deception. She was already on the warpath when she found them like that. Their confession of love the final push she needed as she had searched tirelessly for weeks for a solution to the problem that the Starks posed. 

She stepped towards them. Her nostrils flared. 

“It’s obvious that wanting me dead has really brought you two together.”

The words had been an almost snarl and a clear order as the guards had descended to rip them apart in the streets. She tried to cling to Jon, he fought them back as best as he could but he had suffered in the battle, there was little he could do to even stand. They cried, screamed. But nobody even gave them a second glance under Daenerys’ ire. 

Daenerys started to list the charges laid against them, between Varys’ execution and Tyrion’s games, she had caught wind of their own wavering loyalties. Sansa had known, when they watched Varys burn, that it was like to end this way, if they had found out Varys’ machinations then Jon and Sansa weren’t to be far behind. 

(When the fire had blazed Sansa had found Jon’s hand in the dark. A promise? For what though, that if they were to go down it would be together. If that was all they could offer each other than so be it). 

She didn’t hear most of the charges though. She knew the gist anyways. Her eyes had locked with Jon’s as they were finally wrenched apart. Their time together had been so small in comparison to the entirety of their lives and they had known then that it was over, that it was ending. He’d said the only thing he could. Thickly and through his tears, but just for her all the same. 

“It won’t be long my love. We must only be brave a short while longer.”

A grim comfort.

Sansa had only gotten out one final confession. 

“I loved you from the first.”

Jon’s eyes widened for a moment before they were parted but it had been only the truth. They had wasted so much time, Sansa should’ve told him back at the wall or when they first got to Winterfell (maybe he wouldn’t have gone running to Dragonstone trying to escape his own feelings). It didn’t matter now. 

Jon’s execution had been prompt, the next morning to be exact. No need for a trial. Sansa had raged like a winter storm (so different from the lightning storm of Daenerys’ birth, she would note). But it hadn’t stopped his head from being untethered from his body, from the scene of her father’s execution being replayed one last time. Daenerys had insisted that Sansa watched. To see her love’s light be extinguished. As if Sansa hadn’t lost everything to her by that point, she had left her dignity behind so long ago and wept openly, unafraid of the backlash of judgement. 

Her eyes stayed on Jon’s til the end.

(Later Sansa thought privately that Daenerys was scared to try and burn Jon, knowing the truth of his parentage as she did. But nobody commented, the time of the dragon had returned and she still had Drogon to silence those who dared question her authority. The rumours of Varys’ end had spread quickly). 

It had been weeks and she didn’t know why the Mad Queen kept her alive. For sport? Her own sense of slow torture? Did she want to see Sansa’s sanity break fully?

But then Sansa is pulled from her thoughts as guards are marched into her cell, they picked her up and half carried her from her cell. After weeks of being caged she doubted whether she could walk anyways and was somehow grateful for the support. 

Before she knew it she was outside the city, out in a field being shoved down onto her knees. She looked up and gulped. 

There was a small crowd, Daenerys at the head and Drogon looming behind her. She saw a few others. Tyrion seemed mightier than she had ever known him to be. Sansa knew what it all meant.

Though somehow she was surprised, there was to be no final parlay with the Dragon Queen, she almost felt robbed. What had the weeks of isolation been about? One final punishment private to the Dragon Queen alone. Daenerys blazed. She looked undone, every bit the conqueror she was now known to be. So Sansa set her shoulders and raised her chin, looked the woman in the eye and heard out her sentence. She’d lost her dignity but she could be brave, all the way to the end.

“Lady Sansa of House Stark, you are hereby sentenced to death for conspiring against the realm to place your late cousin Jon Snow on the Iron Throne. This is unspeakable treason against House Targaryen and will be punished without need for a trial. Do you have any final words?”

Daenerys’ voice was crisp, an edge to it that Sansa could read easily enough. 

“You are not worthy of my words Daenerys. You never have been.”   


Sansa saw one last look of disgust before she closed her eyes to the scene. She cared not now that she may very well be remembered as nothing more than an arrogant and petulant woman who didn’t have the dignity to die with grace. 

Instead she spent her final few moments with her family.

Vaguely she heard the word she had come to know well falling from Daenerys’ lips, the one that signalled her imminent death.  _ Dracarys.  _ But it rang hollow. 

She felt heat and flames danced behind her eyes but it brought her peace. The flames transformed and suddenly it was only the rustling leaves of a weirwood tree and when she looked to the ancient trunk she saw them there. Mother and father, with a woman she knew could only be Lyanna Stark her age and similarity to Arya enough of a clue. Robb, Bran and Rickon to the far side and Arya on the other. They were all smiling, they were clean, unscathed and incredibly whole. In the middle of them all stood Jon. 

“We’ve been waiting for you my love.”

Jon extended his hand. 

She let one final breath out and reached for his hand. Heat was everywhere. But all at once, in the release, she found a certain serenity. So Sansa gave into the flames.

**Author's Note:**

> i have been so damn busy and I can't find it in me to write anything right now haha. This is barely edited but this has been in my head for months and so i just kinda word vomitted. It all came from me thinking about Sansa at the end, defeated and the only thing ringing in her mind is "all was lost". It is simply tragic and haunting. Then there is one line here from taylor swift's new album. "It's obvious that wanting me dead has really brought you two together" it helped inspire me to really get this written. (that entire album...so much jonsa). 
> 
> anyways this basically has no plot other than what is there but if you have questions feel free. 
> 
> i hope i get out of this rut soon and write something worthwhile, i hope you enjoy this in the meantime. love you guys <3


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